Abortion and Murder, cont.

Rick says:

I am inclined to agree with Eduardo that there is a difference -- one that is relevant to the perpetrator's culpability and deserved punishment -- between procuring or performing an abortion and maliciously causing the death of an adult.  True, both involve the deaths of human beings, and both are wrong.  But, it seems to me, the state-of-mind, or mens rea is almost certainly different (if only because the humanity of the victim, and therefore the wrongfulness of the conduct, is impossible to avoid in the latter situation), and so it does not seem to me odd, or hypocritical, to concede (as Ponnuru does) that the law may treat them differently.

Ponnuru says:

[O]ur society includes people who take many different good-faith moral views about the issue, [and] I can see this pluralism as a legitimate reason for lenity in enforcing the prohibition.

I simply can't find a way to reconcile these perfectly reasonable statements with attempts to rule out as unreasonable certain positions on how best to deal with the problem of abortion that do not involve its legal prohibition at all.  If "pluralism" about the status of a fetus is "reason for lenity in enforcing the prohibition" of abortion, to the point of ruling out criminal sanctions at all, at least for the present time, why isn't that same pluralism a reason for abstaining from legal prohibition in the first instance unless or until we can form a greater societal consensus?  If the decision of which sanctions to impose leaves "considerable room for prudential judgment in the drawing up of laws," why doesn't the decision whether to ban abortion at all? 

On top of all of this, I see no way to reconcile the content of this discussion about the many prudential judgments required in devising a legal response to abortion (a discussion with whose basic premises I am in complete agreement) with the more strident arguments calling abortion murder, comparing the abortion issue to slavery, deriding Democrats as the "Party of Death," and suggesting (as many Catholic Republicans did during the last election) that faithful Catholics cannot prioritize issues like the poverty, the death penalty, or the Iraq war over the abortion issue or vote for a presidential candidate who opposes the legal prohibition of abortion.  I just don't think you can have your cake on this and eat it to.  If abortion is the murder of millions of innocents that dwarfs all other issues, then there is no room for compromise or delay (including by your own favored politicians, who, despite control over all branches of the federal government and a majority of state governments, seem to be taking the slow road to the promised land).  If, however, abortion is a terrible wrong, the legal response to which is a complicated prudential issue on which reasonable people can disagree, and about which our society currently enjoys no consensus at all, then it seems to me that the permissible policy positions are far more numerous than is typically admitted and that, in addition, it is perfectly reasonable for Catholics to vote on the basis of issues on which more immediate progress is likely to result from a change in leadership.